An easy way to shorten sales cycles

How do you shorten sales cycles? Simple: be where your customers are looking. MarketingSherpa recently investigated how decision makers and influencers get information about products and services, and their findings show that customers are looking in different places than before – which has important implications for marketers.

Let your customers choose

Your customers are choosing, whether you’re the one giving them the choices — or not. That’s the message of the Web 2.0 era, and it was reinforced again in the last week of July. That’s when the hottest viral video of the week belonged to a UK nonprofit dedicated to stopping violence. The campaign launched on YouTube and within a couple weeks had rocketed to three-quarters of a million views per week.

Who says social media and b-to-b marketing don’t mix?

We’ve long suspected it would happen and that it wasn’t just a fad for consumer marketing. And now there’s evidence to prove our suspicions: according to the most recent (July 20, 2009) issue of BtoB magazine, social media use is soaring — up nearly 400% — among b-to-b marketers.